With far-right supervisor leaving, logic and sanity can return to Sacramento County | Opinion
.JPG "Sacramento County Supervisor Sue Frost is surrounded by a transparent screen as she listens to public comment during the board’s meeting at the County Administration Building in downtown Sacramento on Tuesday, Aug. 24, 2021. Frost was the only supervisor who didn’t wear a mask at the meeting.")
Here lies the political career of Sacramento County Supervisor Sue Frost, c. 2012-2024. After eight years of promoting harmful and uninspired conspiracy theories to the denizens of Sacramento County, and for four years before that as a Citrus Heights councilmember, she has finally decided not to run for reelection.
Memento mori.
In remembrance of her last eight years on the dais, let us join hands and return our attention to some of Frost’s greatest hits:
Who among the gathered could ever forget her unabated attempts during the COVID-19 pandemic to spread misinformation and conspiracy theories despite all rational evidence to the contrary? While acting as board chair in 2021, Frost had to be officially rebuked by her colleagues for not only allowing misinformation to be presented as fact at board meetings, but also for actively helping to spread it.
Case in point: At the same meeting where Frost was reprimanded, she also allowed a “special” member of the public to jump the long public comment line. The voice that Frost was so desperate to have everyone hear was that of Dr. Michael Huang — who used his time to strongly recommend people sick with COVID use the livestock antiparasitic ivermectin, vitamin D and a daily aspirin.
At that point in time, Huang had already been reported to the Placer-Nevada County Medical Society for unprofessional conduct and issuing falsified mask exemptions; he would eventually lose his contract with Sutter Health and close his practice in Roseville. Huang has since been appearing on FOX News to spread further vaccine misinformation.
In early 2021 then, it was little surprise to anyone when Frost never bothered to consult with Sacramento County’s public health officer, Dr. Olivia Kasirye, before putting a “Healthy Communities Resolution” on the board agenda, which essentially called for the county to break off from state oversight during the pandemic.
Frost then refused to wear a mask in the board chambers, leading her colleagues to place an embarrassing plexiglass box around the board chair’s seat, giving the distinct impression of an angry raccoon accidentally surrendered to a cat shelter: We know it shouldn’t be there and it knows it shouldn’t be there — but you can’t deny it’s fascinating to watch from behind thick glass.
Neither can we forget the time she co-organized an in-person event at the height of the pandemic along with former Sacramento County Sheriff Scott Jones called “Re-Open Cal Now.” Or how about when she showed up at an anti-vaccine rally in front of Kaiser Roseville, speaking to to the local FOX news station about a wide variety of debunked vaccine myths, including the claim that vaccine mandates somehow violated the Nuremberg Code?
Remember when she said racism doesn’t exist? Or that “children do not get or die from (COVID)”? (More than 17,000 have.)
Then there was the incident when she was caught offering to help the would-be organizers of a California “People’s Convoy,” one of several rumored U.S. trucker protests in early 2022, inspired by a similar protest in Canada that disrupted that country for months.
“I am a Sacramento County Supervisor who is communicating with many freedom groups who want to support the convoy. I’m a freedom fighter, Connected with parents faith community, business,” Frost posted on Telegram, a social media app perhaps best known for helping numerous insurrectionists coordinate their Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
“Do you need a group to coordinate in Sacramento?” Frost asked. “Maybe I can help.”
Now that Frost is done with the county, maybe she’ll have more time to focus on her business, the “Gorilla Learning Institute” which just wrapped up an eight-week series of courses on civil liberties hosted by KrisAnne Hall, who travels the country preaching to militias, anti-government groups, church groups, lawmakers and law enforcement that “U.S. citizens do not need to comply with the government,” according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.
In her announcement, Frost said that, after considering “several real leaders” in the area, she is endorsing current Folsom Mayor Rosario Rodriguez for her vacated seat on the county board.
That endorsement is enough in and of itself to make Rodriguez a questionable candidate.
Not that there’s a problem with a dissenting voice on the board of supervisors. In fact, there’s currently a conservative majority on the board, so any dissent here is actually coming from the left. What has made Frost’s tenure so untenable was not her conservatism, it was her disgraceful enabling of conspiracy theories and far-right-wing talking points that endangered all 1.6 million people living in this county while simultaneously decrying any attempt by her constituents or colleagues to prove her wrong.
District 4 — recently redistricted to include my childhood neighborhood of North Highlands — also includes portions of Rio Linda, Antelope, Orangevale and to the southeast, a large swath of rural Sacramento County abutting El Dorado County. It’s a considerably more conservative community than, say, Phil Serna’s District 1 or Patrick Kennedy’s District 2, so it’d be foolhardly to hope the weight of the board will swing anywhere near the left.
That community needs someone who represents their values and views, not someone who will repeat talking points they found in insurrectionist chatrooms.
What this vastly variable, mostly middle-class and mostly unincorporated area deserves is what District 3 found in County Supervisor Rich Desmond: A moderate, conservative leader willing to work with colleagues. The residents don’t need — and never needed — another wannabe FOX News pundit embarrassing them from the dais.
